Tag Archives: U.S.

There’s A Lesson Here

A recent Vox article focused on a question–perhaps the question–that consumes most sentient Americans these days, especially the seven million of us who turned out for the No Kings protest: can America recover, or have we lost representative government forever?

As the article began,

The president of the United States is deploying masked troops to the streets of blue cities, working to put friendly billionaires in charge of the media environment, and attempting to jail his personal enemies.

Can any democracy come back from this?

There is relevant research on that question, and the article cited two papers published earlier this year that seemingly came to opposite conclusions. In both, researchers examined what are called “democratic U-turns.” Those are situations in which  a country that begins as a democracy subsequently moves toward authoritarianism, but recovers in relatively short order. The first research team’s conclusions were optimistic. “They identified 102 U-turn cases since 1900 and found that, in 90 percent of them, the result was “restored or even improved levels of democracy.”

The second team, however, focused on 21 of the most recent cases and concluded that “nearly 90 percent” of alleged U-turns were “short-lived mirages.”

After contacting both teams of researchers, the author concluded that the seemingly opposed findings weren’t actually inconsistent —and that the implications for the United States are both hopeful and disturbing.

Both research teams used a “democracy score” that takes into account how free the press is, whether elections are free and fair, and other accepted markers of democratic societies. A U-turn is defined as the country’s democracy score rebounding after a recent decline — and the data suggests that such U-turns are very common, that over half of all countries that have experienced a slide toward autocracy have also experienced a U-turn. And the research found that those U-turns have typically been very successful.

Good news, right? But as we know from differences in poll results, results will vary depending upon who you ask and how you frame the question.

The second group of researchers focused their analysis on twenty-one cases of democratic U-turns that occurred post-1994.  The authors then looked to see how many of those countries maintained their higher, post U-turn democracy scores. Their analysis extended to the years following those that the first team analyzed–looking to see whether the gains of a country’s U-turn were sustained. The findings on that score give us little cause for optimism; “out of the 21 cases, 19 countries experienced another decline in their democracy score within five years of the seemingly successful U-turn.”

Both teams of researchers emphasized that their findings were not in tension. For one thing, modern autocratization differs from the historical pattern. “Before the 1990s, democracies tended to be toppled by coups or revolutions — unmistakable uses of force that ended the current regime and replaced it with naked authoritarian rule.”

Nowadays, thanks in large part to democracy’s increasingly dominant ideological position around the world, the threat tends to come in a more subtle and hidden form — what scholars call “democratic backsliding.” In these cases, a legitimately elected government changes the laws and rules of the political system to give itself increasingly unfair advantages in future elections. The ultimate aim is often to create a “competitive authoritarian” regime, where elections are not formally rigged but take place under such unfair conditions that they can’t truly be considered democratic. That’s what Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party did in Hungary, and what PiS tried to do in Poland.

And–rather obviously–what Trump is trying to do in the U.S.

As the article notes, because elected authoritarians were elected, they often represent a real constituency–one that is often large enough to make it impossible for their opponents to defeat them permanently and democratically illegitimate for those opponents to outlaw them entirely. Just because you have a democracy doesn’t mean you have a stable democracy. As the article concludes:

Even if America experiences a U-turn upon Trump’s departure, the country may not be out of the woods. The forces that made Trump possible in the first place will still remain, open to exploitation by any political leader with the requisite savvy and shamelessness.

“There is a reason why Trump came to power, and there is a reason why he won those elections… If you don’t solve the underlying reasons, then of course democracy will still be at risk.”

I am increasingly convinced that the U.S. will oust Trump and his band of wildly incompetent White Christian Nationalists–that we will experience a U-turn. I am far less sanguine about our ability to address those “underlying reasons.”

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A Comforting Analysis

I should preface today’s post by sharing a basic political premise that comforts me.

When I look around at the multiple examples of injustice, mean-spiritedness, racism and fear that characterize America’s current polarization and unrest, I think back to the 60s and other tumultuous periods in our history. Almost always, those upheavals subside and leave significant social improvements in their wake.

Not perfection. But improvement.

It can be hard to keep that in mind when every day brings new evidence of humankind’s reluctance to deal positively with the challenges we face. And blogs like this one, that tend to focus on those challenges, probably don’t help. But if we take the long view, human society really has seen substantial progress–it’s just a lot slower than most of us would like. And sometimes, because it is slow and incremental, we miss seeing that progress.

Which brings me to Persuasion’s fascinating analysis of the global far-Right.The crux of that analysis is in the introductory paragraphs:

It is hard to be hopeful about democracy today. We are bombarded with headlines proclaiming democracy’s “retreat,” “crisis,” and perhaps even “death.” In the United States, both Democrats and Republicans believe democracy faces serious threats and President Biden has addressed what he views as widespread sentiments that “democracy’s best days [are] behind us.” Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, recent electoral victories by the Brothers of Italy, the Sweden Democrats, and the French National Rally—parties with far-right, even neo-Nazi roots—led many to proclaim that “fascism was returning” and democracy in danger even in Western Europe, a region where it has long been taken for granted. That’s become the reflexive framing for many commentators addressing European politics. The Guardian, for instance, declared Spain’s election, held this past weekend with the right-wing Vox party potentially poised to enter a ruling coalition, “a key battle in the Europe-wide struggle against neofascism.”

This pervasive pessimism is not justified. Far from being a sign that democracy is imperiled in Western Europe, the evolution of the Brothers of Italy, the Sweden Democrats, and the French National Rally should make us cautiously optimistic. These parties have come to recognize that in order to win votes and political power they had to move away from their far-right roots, moderate their appeals and policy platforms, and pledge to play by the democratic rules of the game.

The article argues that, when democratic norms and institutions are weak, extremists lack the incentive to moderate–they can gain power without playing by the rules of the game.

But where democratic norms and institutions are strong—as they have been for decades in Western Europe—extremists tend to be forced to moderate because there is little constituency for explicitly anti-democratic, extremist appeals. And until they moderate, other political actors and institutions are able to keep them from power.

The article documents that moderation, tracing the trajectory of several far-Right European movements–Marine Le Pen in France, Sweden’s Democrats, Brothers of Italy and others.

The author argues that refusing to recognize that these parties have moderated has consequences: it fosters fear and polarization; calling them fascist often bolsters their narrative of being righteous “outsiders;” and calling parties fascist when they are not contributes to misunderstandings about the current state of democracy.

There has certainly been significant democratic backsliding among countries that made transitions to democracy during the late twentieth century. But this is not surprising: all previous democratic “waves”—such as those occurring in 1848 and after the First and Second World Wars—had significant undertows. Notwithstanding, many more democracies have survived the late twentieth century wave than did previous ones. And among established wealthy democracies only one—the United States—has experienced significant democratic decay.

The fact that these parties have moderated doesn’t mean they don’t continue to pose problems, of course. And what is particularly chilling is the author’s explicit recognition that America’s Republican Party has gone in the opposite direction from most of its Western European counterparts: “it has moved from being a center-right or conservative party to a far-right one.”

This reflects underlying weaknesses in American democracy and deep divisions in American society and shows that under such conditions even wealthy, long-established democracies can experience democratic decay.”

The article ends by recommending more democracy– but there’s a caveat:

As long as right-wing populists continue to respect laws, constitutions, and the democratic rules of the game, this is the best way forward: trying to lure voters away from these parties with better ideas.

Large numbers of MAGA world denizens, unfortunately, do not “continue to respect laws, constitutions and democratic rules of the game.”

But then, neither did the Weathermen...

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